Kwakkelde Kwak

Well, chances are nothing will increase performance, 1600 is already pretty fast. The bottleneck might not be on your end to begin with. I personally wouldn't upgrade the memory, there are no guarantees it would speed up things. If you decide to upgrade anyway, make sure both cpu and motherboard support the faster memory, that might not be the case. If you know any people with a higher end system than you have, do a side by side performance test to see if and if so where and when the differences are noticable. I consider my system pretty high end, with the same memory you have, although twice as much, a slightly faster cpu (3770K) and a slightly faster gpu. If you say SL is the only graphic demanding program on your computer, I'd pick the "taking out the wife for dinner" option over new memory. I have the feeling SL just can't utilise all the high end components, but if someone has twice the fps we got on Kuula, I'd love to hear what their specs are.

40C is excellent, but means what we suspected, your card isn't working all that hard. I try to keep mine under 60C, but peaks to over 90C shouldn't be an issue.

Ok, not an asus then. Wouldn't hurt to try the program anyway, chances are it will work with any card. There are other monitoring and tuning tools around, RivaTune or Rivatuner I know of.

Indigo Mertel wrote: Since everyone here enjoys making comparisons to RL, do you think that in RL a squatter would go to the city hall to ask to have power attached? Very much so yes, here in the Netherlands squatters have the right to have gas/light/water attached to their home of choice:) Other than that I agree.

From Coventina I heard you're using an asus card, so I suspect your settings can be chaged exactly like mine on the 670. To monitor your temps, you can download speedfan, it will give you incorrect readings on your i5 though I suspect. Download Speedfan 4.46 To adjust fan settings AND monitor pretty much everything on your graphics card, I use "GPU tweak" by Asus. Download GPU Tweak GPU Tweak pretty much speaks for itself, on the left you can monitor everything on the card like load, voltages, temperature, memory use etc. On the right you can under- or overclock by the press of a button or change the fan speeds manually. GPU tweak includes GPU-Z, which shows you all the specs on the card, not all that important, but informative in case you are interested. To cap the fps to your monitors refresh rate (in my case 60hZ or 60 fps) you can use the NVIdia control panel. Go to "Manage 3D Settings" and select the viewer you're using, you might have to browse for the executable and add it. On the bottom set Vertical sync to "Adaptive" and Triple buffering to "On".

Like Theresa said.... Could you click "time (ms)" and then on the bottom "Time details (ms)" in the menu you posted and repost the picture with the specified times visible?

I should make a notecard so I can copy-paste this response (You're not exactly the only one with this issue lately): Are you by any chance using Skydrive? If so, uninstall it and things should work fine. There are ways to have both SL and SkyDrive, here's link if you're interested: JIRA with workaround and alternatives

Sephy McCaw wrote: More then likely that its because the 660 is brand new and LL haven't had time to test it and release viewer update to set the standard for the card. IM sure you will see an increase of your fps in the next viewer aslong as they don't break it that is. The 660 might be brand new, but it's a tuned down version of the higher end 600 series cards, they have been around since march. I think the only difference is in the number of shaders and the memory bus width, the architecture is exactly the same, chips the same, memory (DDR5) the same. @VRProfessor The small increase in performance is probably because of the fact your old card wasn't running at full power to begin with. Somethig is limiting your fps, but it's not the graphics card. Information processed by it needs to be offered to it first. So if your card is simply waiting for something to do, a better, faster card won't make much of a difference. I went to Kuula and noticed only a 50% or so load on my GPU with fps comparible, although slightly higher than yours. (that can have various reasons, most importantly the number of avatars around I guess). My GTX670 (not 660 like Coventina said) wasn't getting any warmer than 41 C. On a sim not as crowded and loaded, the card works a lot harder and I had to cap the fps at 60 to prevent it getting 70 C (A number NVidia or Asus seem to like, since the fan will keep it there) So again, I'd say the upgrade in GPU will only be noticable when you make it work harder in areas that don't need SL input. That would be fancy shadows and reflections and such. It all makes sense I guess. I think it has been said before, the sim fps shouldn't affect your screen fps all that much. The sim fps is the rate at which the server send you changes, that's server side. The screen fps is the rate at which pictures are built to show on screen, that's all happening inside your black box. Btw I experimented a bit and put my cache on a ramdisk, since I suspected the reading of cache might be the issue. I don't see any performance gains, but I think I'll keep my cache there anyway, it's using RAM I don't need and saves a lot of write/read cycles on my SSD. In another thread someone did some benchmarking, with the conclusion the biggest performance gains were made by using faster RAM. If people say they get splended graphics with their new systems including 600 cards, you should ask the question what they are comparing it to. A lot of people will compare it to maybe 2 or 3 generations ago. I myself can only compare it to 4 generations ago, which is 5 years. I also compare my current graphics to how SL looked in 2006, when joined SL. All in all that results in my observation my graphics look great. It's all very relative.

I guess it's more of a retorical question and I agree with the other answers, usually it looks like crap. Still I'd like to answer. The reason people use it on something like grass, is the colours will be more consistent when light hits them. So when your experiencing the "alpha glitch" or "alpha sorting problem" (where SL doesn't know which plane to render first and things in the back show up front), it won't be nearly as visible. This will give a better result in daylight, but leaves you with radioactive grass at night. The same is the case for leaves of trees and hair. So either the builders who use it are only building and playing SL at daytime, or they think the improved looks at daytime outweigh the odd looks at night.

I bet the difference is caused by body morphs, in either the bones or skin. Even if you get the two to match perfectly, this means it won't be perfect when you alter your shape, or when someone else wears your "doodle" or when you start animating the avatar. So even if the two models are a perfect match, a slightly different t-pose will show the doodle differently. The model inworld definitely doesn't have more vertices. In fact is has slightly less, because in Blender the head, upper and lower body are seperated, leaving you with double vertices on the seam. It is the exact same model though, as far as topology goes. Adding more geometry by subdividing won't help either. The only thing I can think of that might help you, is "doodling" along the edges of the model (the lines you see in the mesh). But with an avatar shape as crude as the SL avatar, the UV layout as it is and odd skin weights in some places, I don't think you'll ever get a perfect result. Try to find the places where the morphs affect the shape as little as possible when animating or morphing, then place your detail there (clothing seams or collars for example). The rest you can fill in with less detailed texture (like a slab of cloth or even plain color).

Thanks for verifying that. The problems I read about didn't include crashing like you experienced. Good to know that can also be caused by the Skydrive. There is a JIRA about the subject, where a workaround is given so you can use both SL and Skydrive. You'll have to be comfortable with editing your registry by hand though. Another option is using a similair program, from what I read there are plenty of alternatives. JIRA with workaround and alternatives Search for Latif Khalifa's post, it's somewhere at 2/3 now.

Are you using Skydrive? That is giving the same or similair results lately for a lot of users it seems.

I just noticed something I overlooked earlier. It looks like your mesh is made out of three pieces, since the server weight is 1.5 instead of the per object value of 0.5. I'd suggest you make a single mesh, that way the physics hull or custom physics shape will be much more efficient. For the two lowest LoDs, I'd use planes I think, a two sided plane for the backlegs and backrest, single sided ones for the seat , front and sides. That should result in 12 triangles. If it doesn't look right for the low LoD, you could always model a simple 3D version. That shouldn't take nearly as much as the uploader used.

If you mean one end of the path needs to be narrower than the other, a cylinder won't do that. Try a tube instead and skew it.

It could also be a problem with the collada exporter. OpenCollada as an exporter for 3ds max loses the UV data completely when trying to use it for SL.

If you own the sculptmaps and they are full perm, you can download them, do as described, then upload again. If you don't have gimp or photoshop or anything like that, you should ask the creator.

Ok, good thing I left the 0.1% there when I thought Blender would have smoothing groups like 3ds Max, looks like it doesn't. For Blender split edge is the thing to use then, but it will create new smoothing groups. A smoothing group is simply a group of faces that will blend their normals, like the round side of a cylinder, or the entire surface of a sphere or one side of a box. If you set one polygon on such a surface to another smoothing group, the edge will be sharp. You can assign multiple groups to a single surface so you can have a sharp edge somewhere in the middle of one surface. If you say the split edge doesn't really split them (which the command with the same name does in 3ds max), I think that splitting edges might even be an easier way than doing it by manually assigning groups. All a bit academic, since Blender does it one way and 3ds max another. Setting the shading to flat means removing all smoothing groups I guess. Btw I have never seen the effect you created on the left. Something for the Blender folks to work on I guess, that looks like a bug to me, unless someone can come up with a use for it. Looks like 3ds max doesn't look in all four directions, but only in the directions where there's a shared smoothing group. This is the equivalent in 3ds Max of your cylinders plus one with one smoothing group (or in Blender smooth shaded).

If by nano prim you mean the ones that are cut, dimpled and twisted to make them appear smaller, no it's not possible. You can do something else though, if you insist on using sculpts instead of the much more versatile mesh. The sculpts use a 256x256x256 grid for the place of the vertices. This means you can make a sculpt twice as small by building nothing in the 0-64 region and in the 192-256 region. Most sculpt exporters scale automatically though, so then you need to build your sculpt the way you like it and edit the map afterwards. That can be done in photoshop or gimp. You can shrink along one axis even, but to shrink as a whole: The mystery of “nano” sculpted prims explained Take in mind twice as small means half the detail you can obtain, since instead of being on a 256x256x256 grid, your sculpt is now limited to 128x128x128.

Instead of splitting your edges as described in (6) you could also use smoothing groups. For SL it doesn't make a difference, but you can get rid of any duplicated verts in Blender. I know duplicate verts or edges can be a pain when you want to move them for example. So one smoothing group for the top and bottom of the cylinder (they don't touch so can be in the same group) and one for the rest. I'm 99.9% sure Blender has this option. I really can't think of a thing besides a better representation for number of verts in SL that would be easier when actually splitting. Then again, everyone has their way of doing things and I am sure I have some weird modelling manners myself.

Indigo Mertel wrote: 1. Vertices have a higher cost than faces. While it is important to model with the least number of faces, it is even more to follow practices to reduce the number of vertices. Vertices cost more than faces in download weight and therefor in most cases the landimpact. This doesn't mean you should always go for less of them at the cost of more faces. More faces mean higher render cost. This won't be an issue for something as basic as blocks (houses etc) where the number is nowhere near as high as with curved items like clothing or cars. Normally I'd go for the least amount of faces. In your example though, the number of faces was reduced so far that lighting oddities started to appear. I would always keep a flat surface connected everywhere to avoid that. Maybe in one of the lower LoDs you could do something like that, or do what Gaia did in her example, with holes not modelled, but made with an alpha channel. 2. Disconnected faces with overlapping edges are to be avoided. On a shared surface, yes. If you have a corner however or any sharp edge using different smoothing groups (or no smoothing groups at all by flat shading), SL would split the vertices on upload anyway. That is what Drongle ment by mentioning the split edge option. That way you will also see a more reliable number of vertices in Blender. (See the difference in Gaia's vertice count in Blender vs the actual count SL would make of it). 3. Based on things I have read on the web it was my understanding that it is more practical to model with quads and even ngons/bmeshes and then triangulate before exporting the model as a Collada file. However, in the examples provided here I see that people triangulate from the beginning. Is this the best approach? That depends on what you are building. If you are going to use a subdivision modifier in Blender (making the model smoother by adding extra geometry), quads will give cleaner results. Also shading effects are smoother in most cases. It will also allow easier UV mapping in a lot of cases, especially in combination with the subdividing. However, on a flat surface which won't ever have to be subdivided and has a simple planar UV map, none of these issues will ever occur. So then the least amount of geometry approach is better. Never forget most tutorials you will find on the web are for high poly modelling, which is very different from low poly modelling for realtime rendering. 4. In some cases it is more efficient to design the topology so that faces are disconnected, as in Drongle's example of a window frame. With that example in mind my understanding is that it is better to sink the vertices of the bar in the window frame, rather than to exactly position the vertices on the frame (?). It really doen't make a difference in either download cost or rendering cost, either way is fine. You'll use just as many vertices and just as many faces. Like I said earlier, on a hard edge the faces are disconnected anyway on upload. 5. I have been working on my model under the assumption that smooth shading should be enabled. This is not necessary on flat surfaces and should be enabled only where needed (?). If a surface is truely flat, smooth shading will be no different than flat shading. (Unless I am really missing something, maybe Drongle can explain). Normally flat shading means split edges all around, but if the faces are connected in Blender AND they have the same normals (the surface is really flat), SL won't split the edges and the result will be the same as smooth shading. The weird effect you see is caused by something else I think, possibly split vertices in Blender. 6. In order to reduce the number of vertices the edge split modifier can be applied on the model. This can be applied selectively through the modifier's settings and by marking edges as sharp. That will increase the number of vertices, all vertices on a split edge are counted for each surface they are connected to. Split edges leave you with a sharp edge though, which is often needed. 7. Always make sure face normals are right by enabling the display of normals or by enabling the Texture Solid and Backface Culling properties. No idea what the texture solid does, but the backface culling can prevent surprises on upload. _____ Here a picture to clarify the split edges and different smoothing groups. On the bottom how you'd build it, on top how SL sees it. On the left there are no sharp edges, so there are 8 vertices. It looks pretty off with the shading though. On the right all edges are sharp (no connected squares share smoothing group), so it probably looks like you want it to. SL sees it like 6 seperate faces, rather than the single face on the left. So the number of vertices goes up to 6x4=24, three times as much.

Or DAZ Studio, not as easy to use, but a lot more possibilities. DAZ for Mac

Probably the autoreduction of the uploader. No idea why it worked before. If you have one polyheavy object in the mix and a lot of low poly items, nothing of those low ones will be left when the uploader start reducing. That's the only thing I can think of.

Ah I didn't see you did it like that, but it doesn't make any difference

Your vertex count is not correct here. SL treats vertices with multiple normals (corners) as seperate vertices. If the backside of the windows is not modelled I count 164 verts for the left picture and 180 for the other (which btw is the same model I built ). Splitting the verts of the wall and windows like you did makes no difference at all. SL would split them on upload anyway if they were welded in Blender. btw... What you built with the alpha is a good way to construct one of the lower LoDs, I would never use textures with an alpha channel for the high LoD wall. chances you get the alpha sorting horror are just too big.

You didn't catch Gaia's small misconception, you explained it though The number of vertices is limited to 65k, not the number of faces. 65k vertices usually results in 130k or so faces. That is uploadable.